Max Planck spinout unveils ‘world’s most viable’ fusion reactor design — and only needs 6 years to build it

German startup Proxima Fusion — whose team includes engineers from MIT, Google, SpaceX, and McLaren — has unveiled a fusion energy reactor design it believes offers the quickest route to commercially viable fusion power.

Dubbed Stellaris, the machine is a quasi-isodynamic (QI) stellarator with high-temperature superconducting (HTS). This type of reactor uses complex, twisted magnetic fields to confine hot plasma, creating the conditions needed for fusion reactions.

“Stellaris is designed to operate in continuous mode and be intrinsically stable,” Francesco Sciortino, Proxima’s co-founder and CEO, told TNW. “No other fusion power plant design has yet been demonstrated to be capable of that.”  

Stellaris’ design builds on the Wendelstein 7-X, the world’s largest stellarator, located at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Germany. While Wendelstein 7-X was developed for research, Stellaris could one day power the grid. 

Proxima aims to bring the design to life with its first demonstrator ...